To whom do we complain? I thought about this question while watching a talk given by Dr. Deborah Rhodes at a recent TED conference. Dr. Rhodes, the Director of Mayo Clinic’s Executive Health Program, spoke about the possibilities and politics of screening for breast cancer. She discussed her work with engineers on developing a new […]

Joe is a guy that never really cared about his health. He is overweight, according to any objective standard, and always attributes this to “bigger muscles” (it isn’t). He dutifully comes in once a year, but admittedly only because of his wife’s insistence. She worries about his lack of exercise, his growing abdominal midsection (“muscle”) […]

Occasionally a patient will come in for a visit and during discussion will ask that we run a specific blood or diagnostic test. Sometimes it’s just a matter of curiosity (“What’s my blood type?”), other times it’s because they have a friend or relative recently diagnosed with a disease and they want to be checked […]